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Phase: Participation

How do you ensure your meetings are focused engaging and inclusive for everyone involved?

A lot of times when you get into a meeting, it can feel kind of like the Wild Wild West. You know, someone's talking here things are happening there.

  1. As a facilitator, it's your job to help kind of maintain the flow of the meeting but the same time create an environment where everyone feels like they can talk.

  2. Let's take a look into 👉 the Atlassian Team Playbook play called inclusive meetings. And it's all about how do we set ground rules for our meetings? And these are rules in terms of like how do we want to collaborate?

  3. You might have examples like "Hey, we're gonna raise our hand when we want to speak." Or for every topic, we're gonna hold questions until the end of that topic.

  4. As a facilitator you are accountable and responsible for creating an inclusive environment in your meeting so that everyone feels like they can contribute.

  5. Look for feedback afterwards to determine whether or not in that meeting everybody felt like they could get a voice. And use your intuition. Sometimes you can see that hey, you know got a couple people that are always quiet.

  6. Kind of look and say what can I do to change my environment help make meetings better in the future?

  7. My biggest recommendation to help keep attendees engaged is one use time boxes in your agenda. And two, follow those sign boxes.

  8. Keeping attendees engaged is going to come back to honoring their time saying this is our agenda. These are what we're going to talk about and this is when we're going to talk about it.

  9. This really important to help keep in participants engaged. I can't tell you how many times I get into a meeting and we have 10 minutes on a topic and I look at my watch in 20 minutes have gone by and we're still on that topic.

  10. For me, I feel that facilitator isn't doing their job and I'm like, apparently the rest of these topics don't matter. Final tip for keeping people engaged on a meeting: use the power of a parking lot.

  11. Many times we get into meetings and we find ourselves derailing a topic a little bit with a new topic. Well as a facilitator go in there and say hey, that's a great topic. Let's add it to our parking lot.

  12. If we have time maybe you've set aside time at the end of your agenda for other topics Or you need to set up a separate meeting. This allows again participants to feel that you value their time and you want them to get to the outcomes that they originally attended to get to in that meeting.

  13. When it comes time to end the meeting, maybe you're in the last five minutes of it. There's nothing worse than getting to the end of the meeting where your midway through a conversation and now you're just having to leave.

  14. I always want to make sure I save 5 or 10 minutes on that agenda. It kind of closes out the meeting. Honor that time box make sure that you have that 5 to 10 minutes to review a couple things.

  15. Make sure you review the goal of the meeting - did we accomplish this? I actually like to ask my participants, you know up or down on your with your thumbs. Did we hit the outcome did we get to the place?

  16. We wanted to get to also make sure you go back and look at your action items do we have owners assigned to them? Do we have due dates on those? Have people agreed to take those on?

  17. Make sure you take care of those so that way people leaving say, "Cool the things that we need help with, they are going to get done."

  18. And then finally make sure you go back and look at the decisions you've made as well. Make sure you say, "Hey in this meeting, we we made the decisions on A, B, and C." Just as a reminder to the group that says cool, these are the things that we decided.

  19. This also will help solidify for your participants that hey we actually got some value out of this meeting. We actually were able to get from A to B, which is more than maybe we've gotten to in the past.